Finish the Work of Ada LoveLace and Charles Babbage

Disclaimer

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have prepared to help you is right here.

This project outline is not like the artificial, tidy little problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer by profession, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavour.

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Discover all you can about the analytical engine and create a simulator for it. Your simulator could merely simulate it programming language, or it could be so elaborate as to provide a 3D view of the internal workings of its perfect gears whirring about from any point of view, or like being a mouse in the clockworks.

Using modern high accuracy machining and materials, actually build a mechanical analytical engine.

In a related project, the ancient Mayans had a mechanical calculator for doing calendar calculations. Some people have made computer simulations.

Other early computers you might like to simulate:

Herman Hollerith’s tablulating machine for the 1900 US census.

ABC, the first electronic but non-programmable computer by John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.

Robinson, by Alan Turing and project Ultra, used to successfully decode the Nazi Enigma code during WWII (World War II).

Z-3 the first programmable electronic computer by Konrad Zuse and Arnold Fast.

Some of the old IBM (International Business Machines) unit record equipment you programmed with gold-tipped wires, such as the 407 Lister.

The Librascope, Royal McBee, General Precision, Control Data, LGP-30 — my first personal computer.

The Altair 8080, the first personal computer.

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This page is posted
on the web at:

http://mindprod.com/project/lovelace.html

Optional Replicator mirror
of mindprod.com
on local hard disk J:

J:\mindprod\project\lovelace.html

Please read the feedback from other visitors, or send your own feedback about the site.
Contact Roedy. Please feel free to link to this page without explicit permission.

Canadian Mind Products
IP:[65.110.21.43]
Your face IP:[3.147.205.114]

Feedback

You are visitor number